Go-to-Market for Early-Stage Startups: 5 Key Questions with Lisa Kleinsorge
5 GTM Questions, 1 engaging conversation with Lisa Kleinsorge
Welcome! I had an engaging conversation with Lisa Kleinsorge who leads ecosystem development at Puzzle.io. We're exploring 5 questions about Go-to-Market during 0-1 phase: 1. How do you define Go-To-Market(GTM)? 2. What is your "secret sauce"? 3. Partnership-led GTM, what are the challenges and rewards? 4. What are the top GTM mistakes you often see founders make? 5. When should founders make their first GTM hire, and what traits to look for?
About Lisa Kleinsorge Lisa is a well rounded Go-To-Market (GTM) leader, start-up advisor and investor. Currently, she is leading ecosystem development at Puzzle, a B2B fintech startup. She has over 15 years of experience in GTM, as an executive at influential consumer companies, Spotify, Headspace and Twitter (Now, X). Lisa is also an active Angel investor since 2018.
1. how do you define Go-To-Market?
💡 Go-to-Market is a matrix of Where To Play and How to Win.
The primary goals are acquiring customers and creating an unfair distribution advantage. And as prerequisites, the strategy needs to align with the company's vision, product capabilities, and business model.
The four pillars of Lisa’s GTM strategy framework:
Identifying a target audience with an on-ongoing open channel. The aim is to understand customers / partners needs and pain points. Typically, starting with a narrow group that is most suitable for Minimal Viable Product (MVP). The open channel serves not only as a medium for promoting our offering, also as a valuable source of feedback and insights to inform ongoing product development and refinement of our GTM strategy.
Creating a productive feedback loop with product teams. The key to success involves open and ongoing communication, allowing for the continuous exchange of ideas and feedback. The feedback loop is not only ensures the product evolves in line with customer needs and market trends, it also strengthens the relationship between the product, customers and partners.
Shaping a brand with memorable connections. Establishing brand’s identity, values and messages that emotionally connects with your customers. A strong brand acts as a powerful tool for building trust, loyalty, and recognition in the marketplace. It plays a crucial role in differentiating your product from competitors, influencing customers’ perceptions.
Formulating marketing plan with distribution advantage in mind. crafting marketing plan to create efficient and effective distribution. It involves carefully analyzing the market, identifying potential opportunities, and creating action plan that leverages our unique strengths to achieve sustainable growth.
2. What is your "secret sauce" for finding Where to Play and How to Win ?
💡 Hypothesis - Try - Iterate until something sticks
A signal of product-market-fit (PMF) is everyone will reach out for partnerships. You will have the good problem of deciding who to partner. On the other hand, when you start from zero, it is a blank canvas, we need to go out and pitch while you don’t really know what would resonate with our customers/partners.
Lisa shared her learnings from building partnership during earlier days at Spotify. She realized that motivations to partner are different depending on the organizations’ priorities. She started testing with multiple versions of messaging for different audiences. Over time, she has a good matrix of what resonated with who, and then, she refined her target partnerships with goal alignment in mind. She carried the same tactic from company to company.
Begin with a hypothesis and test it, continue iterating until something sticks. The process would vary according to the product and market. Lisa’s typical process is as following:
Develop a strong collaboration with Product team,
Identify a niche audience in the market that aligns with your Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Associate your product with the places and tools that your target audience loves or needs to use.
Build relationships with potential partners and customers. Listen to them to understand their pain points and help them solve these issues.
Maintain constant contact with my target group, and start gathering forms of social proof from them.
Pro Tip #1: Study other companies in the space. See how they've done it and try to replicate their processes, while also studying the user journey.
Pro Tip #2: The process is manual at first, focus on results before worrying about scalability.
3. Partnership as the initial distribution channel, what are the rewards and challenges?
(startups don’t typically start with partnerships because it takes times to realize results. Puzzle.io made a bold decision to take the partnership led approach as the first GTM channel).
💡 “Partnership is an investment”
💡 “Our partnership approach at Puzzle is all about Crawl - Walk - Run”
Sasha and General Catalyst saw an unique opportunity in the market to create a compelling product, to be at the core of the modern system of financial intelligence. At that time, a slew of open API-enabled upstaters are disrupting the software stack for the office of CFO, empowering them to be strategic partners of CEOs. However, accounting softwares are still antiquated and operate as a closed system. Given the landscape, Sasha (CEO of Puzzle) and Lisa made a bold decision on an unconventional GTM strategy, partnering with the leading FinTech business platforms to create a modern open system of intelligence for founders and CFOs.
The scope for “partnerships” is broad and comes in all sorts of flavors: marketing partnerships, channel partnerships, product partnerships, strategic partnerships, referral partnerships etc. While it is natural to set high expectations in fast paced startup world, it is prudent to keep the “crawl-walk-run” framework in mind.
Crawl
Build trust early because establish trusted relationships take time. Look for opportunities for CEO to build relationships if they don’t know each other yet.
Become very familiar with company’s structure. know the key decision makers and identify advocates.
Map the landscape, it gives you insights on whose up and coming, and helps to priority your partnership target list.
Walk
Understanding partners’ goals and pain points. Important to channeling back to the company as well as crafting a partnership strategy that create win-win.
Creating small wins to build muscle by getting teams to exercise some small partnerships
Finding opportunities to get lightweight marketing from dream partners
Run
Formulate win-win partnership plans with support and commitments from both companies
Measure results and impacts from established partnerships
Iterate towards sustainable collaboration, go deep
When considering partnerships, a couple of call-outs to be aware. First, partnership is an investment, it is possible that a partnership effort won’t materialize in the end, usually due to timing and priority misalignment. Also, partnership is a cross-functional team effort between Engineering, Product, Design and GTM.
4. What are the top GTM mistakes that you often see founders make?
Overestimating Product-Market Fit: A common mistake is assuming that the product is ready for a broad market launch when it might still be in the early days of achieving a true product-market fit. As a result, you will be consumed by wasted resources; especially for startups where resources are scarce.
Neglecting Customer Research: Some founders underestimate the importance of in-depth customer research and rely solely on their assumptions about customer needs. Often times, failing to engage with target customers result in misaligned GTM plan and poor results.
Scaling Prematurely: Founders sometimes make the mistake of prematurely scaling their GTM efforts, such as expanding sales and marketing teams rapidly or expanding into multiple markets too quickly. The effort strains resources and lead to inefficiencies if the product-market fit isn't firmly established.
Ignoring Competitive Landscape: Some founders overlook the competitive landscape and assume that their innovative product will naturally gain traction. It's crucial to understand the competitive landscape, and position the product effectively and ensure clear differentiation.
Underinvesting in Marketing and Branding: Solely focusing on product development without allocating sufficient resources to marketing and branding. Effective marketing and branding are crucial for raising awareness and promoting adoption, even in the early stages of a startup's journey. The balance between product development and marketing / branding is an art.
5. When should a founder make the first GTM hire and key traits to look for ?
💡 a GTM Generalist as the first GTM hire is valuable
I’m an advocate on making the first GTM hire around the time of MVP is about ready. An experienced GTM teammate is invaluable in facilitating customer interactions and formulate GTM strategy while finding product market fit. I often advise founders to bring a GTM GENERALIST onboard with 5 key traits:
Polish: Assess candidates for authentic, confident expression in both verbal and written communication.
Rigor: Evaluate a candidate's ability to analyze data, integrate information, and make quick and critical decisions.
Creativity: Challenge assumption, find new angles in the market, be a resourceful problem solver, comfortable testing and iterating on new ideas.
Teamwork: Look for candidates who can empathize with others, adapt to different social styles, and collaborate effectively.
Ownership: Seek candidates who take initiative, remain proactive, and don't dwell on problems.
To Readers: what is your experience and learnings with go-to-market at early stage startups? who are the GTM expert you recommend that I talk to? welcome you to share in the Comments or DM.